References, Research and Concepts

At the end of every year we work on the studio's new personal portfolio images and for 2011 our main goal was to create stunning images that combined photography, illustration and CCI in just one picture.

After coming up with many great ideas, we decided to create a concept of an undead noble woman, which could show her glorious and beautiful past and at the same time her decay.

The first images that came to our mind were the Dorian Gray portrait from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie and some paintings of French nobles the French nobles. For the undead references we used The Walking Dead for inspiration, as it has a great make-up work (Fig.01).

Concept

Our first idea was create an undead woman in a creepy room, however this would not show her glamorous past and it would look too ordinary as it's what everybody imagines for a picture like that.

Working a little bit more on this idea, we created a concept focusing on two sides of the same woman: one showing an elegant noble and the other a zombie. Like the undead pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, our baroness could only show her real appearance in the moonlight, but at the same time, under the room's candle lighting, she could look young and pretty.

For the final image, we didn't just create the woman's transformation but also two different states in the room to emphasize this transformation (Fig.02).